The thing about shopping on Rodeo Drive is that it’s like shopping in the most expensive neighborhood of any city these days. It’s just clogged by global luxury brands selling the same things everywhere. No city has “good shopping” anymore, and if it does, it certainly isn’t on Rodeo Drive or the Champs-Élysées or Fifth Avenue or wherever. These women can go to a Gucci store at Fashion Island much closer to their homes. (Where the hell do you think Kelly bought that absolutely amazing Gucci print knit cape?) Why the hell do they need to drag Gina all the way to Los Angeles so she can buy the same shit she can get a purse’s throw from her front door?
That said, the only store we see them go to is something called Boulmiche, which sounds like a sort of infection one would get in the throat from swimming in dirty hotel pools at all-inclusive resorts. I shouldn’t be too mean to it, though, because it’s the “big mistake, huge” store from Pretty Woman, which pretty much makes it eligible for historical landmark status in L.A. Too bad it has since moved to a new location, so the gloves are off, or at least as stuffed to the gills as Shannon’s Spanx.
The trip to Boulmiche is supposed to be all about treating Gina because she’s had a very hard year. Not only did she get a divorce and a DUI, but she is apparently biologically incapable of holding onto a pair of sunglasses, a set of keys, one of Kyle Richards’ castoff felt fedoras, a necklace that doesn’t have her name spelled out in golden letters, or her left ovary, which she lost at a Coffee Bean somewhere in Newport Beach. However, while this is supposed to be Gina’s day, she is outside of Boulmiche listening to Emily boul her miches out because she feels like nothing in her life is going right. She can’t be a good mother, a good wife, a good attorney, a good reality star, or a good social-media presence. She feels like she’s failing at everything, and she tells Gina all of this on the Rodeo sidewalk, and Gina just tells her that it’s okay and pats her back and hopes it goes away.
Meanwhile, all the other women are inside the store talking about Emily. Apparently, Jeff Lewis (of Flipping Out fame) said on his SiriusXM talk show on Radio Andy that he talked to Shannon Beador and she said that either Emily or Gina would leave the show soon. (Considering RHOC goes through cast members like a women’s prison goes through sanitary napkins, that’s probably a safe bet.) Emily reacted by going on Twitter and saying that Shannon “lost 40lbs of fat but gained 40lbs of jealous #frozenfishisrevolting.” First of all, this story is more convoluted than a contortionist stuck in a whirlpool floating in space. Secondly, this tweet is weaker than a virgin cocktail at a Mormon father-daughter dance. Of all the things to get mad about, it’s this?
All of the women are in Boulmiche being like, “What the hell is Emily’s problem? She won’t talk to us about it and we don’t really like her.” It doesn’t get any better at lunch when she won’t really open up about her troubles, which even a reality-television psychiatrist could tell you is because she is dealing with all of this crap about her husband, Shane. Emily lashes out but won’t talk about this with the women, so, as Tamra puts it, “She won’t open up so we just think she’s an asshole.”
Speaking of opening up, Kelly gets nice and open with everyone at lunch, and it has to do with the train. Yes, last week Tamra and Victoria Denise Gunvalson Jr. alluded to a rumor about Kelly and a train. I was hoping against hope that this was not about men “pulling a train” on Kelly, which is where someone has receptive sex with multiple men in a row. This is definitely filed under my Sean Cody porn fantasies and I would love to be like, “All aboard the Brian express. Choo! Choo!” but I also realize that this is not something that most women are looking for or would like to be accused of.
It’s such a bald-faced lie. Tamra says that Vicki says that eight guys pulled a train on Kelly, which is one less than a starting lineup of a baseball team. That is just ludicrous. Two guys at once? Okay, that I might be able to buy, like when Lauri accused Vicki of having “multiple partners” at an insurance convention. But eight dudes? Even I wouldn’t be down for that. (Six is the most I could handle at a clip. Don’t ask how I verified that.)
What continues to be confusing is how this information is all coming out. Vicki brings up at dinner that she knows a rumor. Tamra says, “Is it the train?” Then all of the women, on the ride home, decide they’re not going to talk about it and they’re not going to tell Kelly. Then Braunwyn, a Kylie Minogue doppelgänger, decides that she’s going to call Kelly that night and tell her everything she heard. This is the most amateur of moves, because Braunwyn should know that this is going to be a story and should have known to make that call when the cameras were on both of them so that we could see what is going on.
This whole thing reeks of the Streisand Effect, a rule that states if you talk about someone enough they eventually end up cloning their dogs. Not really. It says that the more you try to hide something, the more you end up publicizing it. So we get Shannon saying, “This rumor is vile and I’m not going to repeat it,” but in saying that, we have to address, once again, what the rumor is. The train has left this metaphorical station.
The messed up thing is that Vicki brought it up at all. Even though it was Tamra who named it, that Vicki brought it up on camera means that Kelly needs to address it. Because it’s on the show, she then has to tell her daughter about it, because if Kelly doesn’t, then the kids at school will once they see it on TV. Then it means that, even though we all know it didn’t happen, we will always associate Kelly with pulling a train. Even though we know it’s not true, we’ll all have visions of Kelly Dodd dressed up like Mr. Conductor from Thomas the Tank Engine but, you know, totally getting railed.
It’s not surprising, given these circumstances, that Kelly gets mad when Emily brings it up at lunch, especially because Emily didn’t need to bring it up. She wasn’t even there to hear the rumor, she just wanted to gossip. Yes, she says it’s because she was confused that Vicki was telling her she wanted to get along with Kelly just an hour before shouting to everyone that she knew all of Kelly’s dirty secrets. But still, if Emily really wanted to know, couldn’t she have pulled her bestie Gina aside and asked exactly what the rumor was without getting Kelly and a whole table of busybodies involved?
Kelly reacts by getting up from the table and telling everyone to fuck off. Tamra goes to be by her side and correctly tells Kelly that she can’t always be telling people to fuck off. Kelly’s worst problem is that she reacts to fire not with fire of her own but with more nuclear weapons than Kim Jong-un claims to have. She is not about an eye for an eye. If you try to take Kelly’s eye, she’ll cut off your whole head, shove it up your ass, and then laugh at you when you fart some of your hair back out of your butthole. Kelly gets vicious.
But in this circumstance, I sort of understand why she’s so worked up. Vicki has fabricated something out of thin air to get back at Kelly and now she has to address it when it is completely unsubstantiated. Yes, Kelly and Vicki are cruel to each other. The difference is that Kelly calls Vicki a liar, which she kinda is, and makes fun of her appearance. Vicki, on the other hand, is manufacturing fictions about Kelly. Yes, Kelly is wrong to take the bait, but when the bait is forced down her throat, what is Kelly supposed to do with the fishhook? (Apparently give it to Braunwyn’s husband Sean to make a tacky necklace out of.)
